The 'Downton Abbey' Shocker... Why Did It Happen?

Lovers of “Downton Abbey” are still in shock over the demise of key character Matthew in an unexpected car accident soon after the birth of his son on season three's amazing finale.

Entertainment Weekly has the scoop from executive producer Gareth Neame about why Matthew had to die, Sybil’s unexpected death, and the future of the show without them.

Regarding Stevens’ exit, Neame says:

“Well… we had a lot of notice and a long time to plan the exit…. We certainly didn’t want Dan to [leave], we very much would have liked Dan to have stayed and persuaded him to stay.”

Neame also says of the unfortunate means that took Matthew from the show:

“I think we weren’t really faced with an alternative storyline, because I think audiences would not have accepted Mary and Matthew becoming estranged. It was too big a journey that the audience had been on with this relationship. The idea that he would go off on the journey and she wouldn’t go with him, or the idea that he would leave her or she would leave him, I think that would have been so disappointing and unbelievable to an audience. The only course open to us was that the character had to die.”

Neame added that because Mary is the “heart” of the show, there could be no mutual exit for the two.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to let them both disappear… We know that the spirit of Matthew continues. His child is there. The future is secure. But we don’t know what form that future is going to take.”

Regarding the death of Sybil (Jessica Brown), Neame says the exit was also a contractual issue. However, writers new of Brown’s exit before Stevens’, and thus Sybil’s death was planned without consideration to Matthew’s.

“Jessica wanted to move on and we felt that we could really motivate a very strong storyline for her exit that way…I think obviously in the structure of the storytelling, the Matthew death is done as a complete sudden twist in the last 30 seconds of the show, so you have no sense of bereavement in that episode. You just have shock.

“Whereas the Sybil episode, the whole way toward it, there’s a sort of hint that things aren’t going well, so when it happens, you suddenly think, ‘Oh my God, it’s happening.’ And it happens about three-quarters of the way through the episode so you still have, in the final act, all that sense of bereavement. I think that’s such an emotionally satisfying episode because you have all of the worry that something’s going to go wrong then you have this tragic death of her dying in front of all of her family and then you have just the emptiness and bereavement and you have it all in a single episode. Whereas, with Matthew’s death, of course, Mary doesn’t even know about it by the end of the program. So you’re going to see the bereavement she feels when you come back in the new season.”

Neame also waxes poetic about Mary, the “heart” of the show. He reassures those who may not want to tune in without the Mary/Matthew love story.

“I can guarantee that the structure of the show is the same. It’s these 20 to 25 really beloved characters with their intertwined stories and a mixture of drama, comedy and warm romance. And I can tell you that, so far, the early scripts for the new season are as brilliant as they’ve always been…I think people love these characters and people love Mary. I mean people like strength, they like complexity.

“She’s not a character you see a great deal, I don’t think, in film or television. She’s quite complex, she’s not easy to get to know. We’ve sort of warmed with her, haven’t we, as we’ve watched her these three years? We all know that people can have relationships at different stages of their lives. In 1912, when this show started, we saw a young woman, Mary, meeting Matthew and forming a youthful relationship and now we’re 10 years later, so we’re going to see an older, widowed Mary presumably looking at some point to form a second relationship, which I think will have a more mature quality.”

What did you think of the shocking death of Matthew? Of Sybil?

More importantly, will you tune in to watch Mary fall in love all over again?